Greta Thunberg has responded to an oil and gas company in Alberta, Canada that appeared to use a graphic image of her being sexually assaulted to promote their products in a post on Twitter. It comes after the company was reported to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on claims of distributing child pornography, which the RCMP responded by saying, ‘it does not constitute a criminal offence’.
‘Someone DREW A CARTOON of Greta Thunberg, a teenager, being violently raped,’ a social media user tweeted last week. ‘Naturally, some oilfield companymen decided to PRINT IT ON A PROMO STICKER WITH THEIR LOGO. Men love to laughingly remind us that if we speak out, we deserve what’s coming to us.’
Replying to the tweet, Thunberg said ‘They are starting to get more and more desperate... This shows that we’re winning.’ Her response has attracted near 300,00 likes and over 8,000 replies from people outraged by the incident.
The promotion came to light last week when someone who works at the company, X-Site, sent a picture of it to a friend who later shared the image on Facebook. It shows a sticker with ‘X-Site Energy Services’ printed on the bottom with a cartoon of a nude woman in plaits above it, with two hands pulling her braided her and the word ‘Greta’ written across her lower back.
According to the worker, the stickers weren’t distributed at their workplace but were circulating among colleagues with one saying they had been asked if they’d be interested in a similar sticker promotion. When Michelle Narang, who shared the sticker on Facebook, complained to a manager of X-Site asking if they knew about the sticker that appears to depict the rape of a minor they said that they were aware. ‘She’s not a child, she’s 17,’ they allegedly told Narang.
Given that the criminal code in Canada states that child pornography is any visual representation of a person under the age of 18 engaged or depicted to be engaged in sexual activity, the case was reported to the RCMP.
‘According to our experts, the image does not meet the criteria for it to constitute a criminal offence,” an officer told HuffPost.. A spokesperson for the company has since told City News Edmonton, a Canadian news site, that neither X-Site nor any X-Site employee was involved in making the sticker.
‘Someone has done this. That’s all I know,’ they said.
Leela Sharon Aheer, culture minister for the Canadian government, denounced the image online. ‘The graphic in this article is completely deplorable, unacceptable and degrading.,’ she tweeted. ‘This is not what our province stands for. Whoever is responsible should be ashamed and apologize immediately. I stand with Albertans against this horrendous image.’
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